You’ve been working on this project for several years. What has the creative process been like and how has the project evolved since you started?
In the beginning, it was a question of sitting down and recording the people in my life whose stories seemed worth recording. Then when I went to England with my grandmother many years ago, and I realized that all these stories, even if they overlapped, weren't entirely the same, and in some cases, they were in direct conflict with each other. That started raising questions about what had really happened and what could be considered the “real facts”. Over time, I began to understand the larger history beyond what had been told to me. I started seeking out archival sources around the world and piecing together the broader story of what they had gone through. Because she was a child at the time, my grandmother didn’t necessarily have a sense of the broader context of WWII.
As for time, it was a question of developing a process to give each person’s story the focus and attention it felt like it deserved, but then learning how to see the larger truth. I came to understand over time that the truth wasn’t necessarily only in the facts of what my ancestors were put through, but in something deeper.
Was there a point where you felt like you had transitioned from telling your grandmother or great aunt’s story to your own story?
When this all started, I was focused on my grandmother and really just documenting what she told me. When the two sisters were brought together, then it became about documenting them together. After that, I tried to dig deeper and learn more about what had happened. Then just as I was starting to get the sense that I understood their story, my grandmother passed away, which created a crisis for me because I no longer had her as a resource to go back to. This was part of why I put the film aside for a while, because I felt like I couldn’t tell a story that I hadn’t actually mastered yet. So in a way, her death was what eventually led to me taking this on as my own story.
There’s a big part of this work over the last year or so that has been about understanding what my female ancestors went through during the war and what was erased—not only as Polish political prisoners but also as women. That experience was transmitted through the family, as these forms of trauma are. What I came to understand was that even if I was a man who grew up in a peaceful time in Canada, I could identify with these experiences, because they’re also part of me. It wasn’t only about trauma, but also the courage and strength and the dignity that they found to survive. Instead of identifying with the wartime heroism of my soldier grandfathers who died before I was born and whose stories I never actually heard directly, I had an easier time understanding the stories of my grandmother and her sister and my great grandmother.
It took time after my grandmother was gone to gain the confidence and find all of these archival sources to more fully understand her history and see how I was a part of it. Professor Katherine Jolluck at Stanford helped me see the larger picture in that the archival materials and documents have always been there, it’s just that they’re spread out everywhere around the world. So to actually fully grasp of the history, you have to travel great distances because it doesn’t exist anywhere else. It weirdly took that whole process of going to London, Warsaw, Lusaka, Dar Es Salaam, Stanford and New York to understand that my grandmother’s stories and the stories of her family were where history resided.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in making the film and how did you overcome it?
There were a few! The biggest challenge initially was finding the resources to go and document this in a comprehensive way. It started off very modestly, interviewing my grandmother and the people in Montreal who were part of her community. But I quickly understood that I would need to go to England, the United States, Poland and East Africa if I wanted to get a bigger grasp of it. In trying to find the financial support to do this, I found it challenging to explain the history to people. The short elevator pitch of my grandmother’s story was striking, but once it got deeper, it was difficult to convey. So actually finding money was more difficult than I thought at the beginning. I didn’t understand the story enough to really find what I needed, or know where to track it down.
Once I got started, the biggest challenge was that every door that I opened, opened another door further away in a different country, such as an archive in East Africa, Europe, or the United States. This was because, at the end of the war, when it became clear that these people couldn't go back to Poland, all the artifacts documenting their journey and experiences ended up in countries spread out around the world. So in order to get a sense of that history, you really need to travel to five or ten different archives in order to understand what they went through. At the beginning of working on the film, I didn’t even know about these places. So every time I spoke to someone who told me about another organization or archive, I had to find my way there.
Do you feel that you could keep going with the research indefinitely, or did you reach a point where you felt like you had enough?
I got to a place where I felt like I had enough to tell the history in a competent way, having mastered it to a certain point. But this is the kind of work that could go on for a lifetime because I know that there are archival materials in Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran, and Kenya, that I could go and access if I wanted to. In each of those places, I would more than likely find tangible traces or documents about my own family. That’s a difficult treasure map to put down.
Was there something that surprised you along the way in the research process?
On the one hand, the family story that I grew up with was already epic. It’s incredible to think that my eleven-year-old grandmother was deported from Poland to Siberia and spent ten years travelling through Russia, central Asia, the Middle East and Africa before immigrating to England and then finally Canada. But when I started getting into the archives and actually finding documentation about that whole odyssey and deportation, it became even more incredible than I had imagined. The descriptions of what was going on were beyond my imagination at the time.
The second thing was in finding these resources, materials and documents, I ended up finding a lot of documentation directly linked to my family and answered questions that had been left lingering since the time of the war. For example, it had never been clear what had happened to my great grandparents. My grandmother had remembered them being forcibly deported from Poland the day before she was, and never seen again. Literally just a couple months ago, I found their death certificates from a gulag in Siberia from 1941 in a Russian archive.
When you actually find the records and you see that this isn't just a story that’s being told, but it’s actually a documented event, it’s pretty incredible. It's funny because, on the one hand, you may think it’s obvious, if you go hunting for traces of your family history you’ll find them. But I was surprised at how concrete and tangible the information was that I was able to find, I was literally finding signatures of my grandmother and her family from the war.
Central to the film is this notion of homeland. What does homeland mean to you?
I’ve always had a very portable sense of homeland, without understanding what that really meant and where it came from. A lot of the questions that I started asking about my family history arose after living in South African Mozambique in 2006-2007. I was surprised by how at home I felt over there. Of course, as soon as I started thinking about it, I remembered that’s actually where my family was from. But as a white man from Canada, it was a strange feeling to have that I could feel at home when I was in East Africa. It’s a problematic thing to assume that I have the right to feel at home there.
Instinctively, my feeling of homeland was always very transportable, and it was centered on the people I was surrounded with more than the place I found myself in. In digging deeper into my family history and speaking to my grandmother and my extended family, I came to understand where that came from, which was a refugee experience in the second world war and passing through a dozen different countries without knowing if they’d ever find a place to call home again. They had to create a sense of home wherever they were, and that’s something that I think gets passed down in many families who have been displaced. The privilege of being raised in Montreal, Canada, is that we live in a country surrounded by people from other places. We have the luxury of feeling at home here but at the same time, we can hang onto the other places we’re from. I’ve never had to struggle with “where I’m from” because I feel like I’m from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Has your personal sense of homeland shifted over the course of making the film, i.e. do you feel more Polish today than six years ago?
I play with this a bit in the film, where I go back to Belarus, to the village in former Poland where my family is from, as well as the refugee camp in Tanzania. I’m trying to find tangible traces of our family history in those places. The funny thing is interrogating my Polishness, I’ve become a filmmaker, and in becoming a filmmaker I’ve become more Polish. The process of the film, in a way, is the process of inheriting my grandmother’s story, and her story is a lifetime of juggling different senses of identity and homeland. I definitely feel more connected to Poland, but my connection to Poland is one of leaving it. In fact, the most Polish thing my grandmother did was leaving Poland and then holding onto her identify for her entire life, notwithstanding the fact that she never went back.
There are many cultures in the world that have gone through this kind of thing, whether Armenians or Jews coming out of Israel thousands of years ago, these are cultures that, in part, are defined by hanging onto your identity against the odds.
The people who stayed in Poland often say that those who were deported aren’t “real Poles” because they didn’t stick it out and fight for the homeland, struggling against the Communists and Soviets. Whereas the people who left say that they held on the culture that was there before the war, a culture of tolerance and openness. I don’t really believe any of this too deeply, I’m not a nationalist. I can feel patriotic, but nationalism seems like an arcane concept to me because everything is moving anyway, nothing is static.
If your grandmother held onto her Polish cultural identify her whole life in Canada, whether for comfort, familiarity, or a sense of community, there must have a reason. In a way, it’s a very Canadian thing to do.
It almost seems post-nationalist for Canadians to hold onto different identifies. One of my favourite scenes in the film is when my grandmother and her sister and talking about where they're from, and my great aunt who has now spent 60 years in England says: “When I'm in Poland I’m a foreigner there, and when I’m in England I’m a foreigner here.” And my grandmother, who spent most of her life in Canada replies: “Why do you feel that way? I’m 100% Canadian.” They get into a bit of argument when my aunt says that her sister can’t really be Canadian because she wasn’t born there. My grandmother didn’t see the contradiction, stating: “I’m Polish, but I’m also Canadian.” Their conversation shows the different forms of cultural integration. In England, you’ll never be a real Brit, in the most racist extreme, if you’re not white from the UK going back hundreds of years. Whereas in Canada, nobody really has a claim to being more “Canadian” than anyone else, except for indigenous people.
What do you hope the impact of the film will be on on the Polish-African diaspora, and audiences more widely?
I hope they’ll stumble upon the film and it will give them some sense of there being a larger community and resources to turn to, because when I was younger that didn't exist, there were no traces that were easy to find. A couple of months ago, for example, somebody contacted me out of the blue after stumbling onto the film website. She’s a granddaughter of a Polish-Ugandan refugee now living in Maryland. She was going back to visit Uganda, and she didn't know until she found the film that there was a whole community of people with similar stories. So that’s a good feeling when people are finding the website helpful, or finding the film helpful in discovering their own roots.
Beyond that, I think that this story has a context to offer not only about the experience of displacement and refugee stories, but also about how history is erased. As professor Catherine Jolek says in the film, the thing to remember about this story is that it was largely women and children who were deported to Siberia, many of whom then ended up in the refugee camps in Africa. That's a big part of why their story went unknown because, at the end of the war, many books were written by men who wanted to talk about armies and soldiers. They didn't want to focus on the refugee experience and the stories of deportation because they weren’t a direct strategy of war, but more of a side-effect. Ignoring these women's history was actually ignoring a big part of how the war was waged.
I think the film is relevant within a lot of the conversations that are happening today about women's stories being erased, or not being heard. It took me a while to understand that that was a central part of my grandmother's history. Nobody believed them, which was an added source of trauma in many cases. They fought against it, they maintained their dignity, but when they would tell people their story, the response was often “come on, you weren’t really deported to Africa”. That resonates with many of the narratives that we’re hearing today as part of the #metoo movement about women not being believed.
With the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, increased insecurity at the border in the States, and millions of displaced people globally, do you think there are lessons that can be learned from WWII refugee stories?
It's difficult to make direct comparisons because the geopolitical situations are obviously vastly different. That being said, experiences of displacement and of becoming refugees, especially for extended periods of time can be very similar. On the one hand, an important part of this story is to consider the fact that Europeans were seeking refuge in the Middle East and Africa. So when Europeans today are nervous about displaced people coming from these regions to Europe, it would be useful to remember that they sought refuge going in the opposite direction not so long ago.
Another thing to consider is that many of the Polish refugees like my grandmother and the other children who grew up in the camps in Africa have many happy memories of that time. After everything they’d gone through in Siberia and the Soviet Union, the camps in Africa were actually a place for them to overcome a lot of trauma. They came out of it surprisingly emotionally healthy and able to cope with what they had been through. One of the surprising things that I discovered in digging into the British and Polish government archives was the human approach with which they set up the refugee camps. Administrators of the British and Polish governments were having really fascinating conversations in the early to mid-40s about how to deal with refugee populations living so far away from Europe and how important it was to give them a sense of safety, comfort and basic humanity.
These considerations could no doubt go into how camps are organized today, although it was a different reality then. It’s also a question of logistics—when you have a camp of 100,000 people how do you provide any sense of normalcy? The biggest camps in Africa were 6,000 people. They built semi-permanent homes from the get-go because the administrators thought that living in tents would just make the refugees feel almost like they were in a concentration camp, like they were still prisoners. So there was a deliberate attempt to give them a sense of normalcy and semi-permanency wherever they were. This allowed them to build a sense of community, even though they knew it was going to be a temporary place to live.
